The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture

Judy Margles, longtime director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, joins me to talk about the institution she spent a career building — and the tensions built into its dual mission of Jewish cultural memory and Holocaust education. We discuss how Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE) "third leg," pluralism, became the connective tissue betwee...

I think about language a lot. Understanding and translating Hebrew is a core part of what keeps me busy and engaged, and in my study of Kabbalah I often confront the limits of what language can convey. But language isn't just a philosophical puzzle — in our broader culture it's being used and abused, deployed in culture wars, for political division and demagoguery. Language can also be a form of s...

Jewish artists have always found themselves in relationship with the world around them. Sometimes that relationship is generative. Sometimes it is uneasy. Often it requires artists to negotiate Jewish identity alongside broader ideas of citizenship, Americanness, Western culture, inherited artistic forms, and the cultural languages in which they work. That tension has become a recurring theme of t...

Hi friends, and welcome to the Art Lab podcast. I'm Rabbi Josh. My guest this week is Brontë Grimm, an Art Lab alum and multimedia artist whose work wrestles with difficult Jewish and other themes, including disability, grief, pain, and suffering. In this conversation, Brontë and I talk about work that is visually striking and sometimes difficult to behold, but that also carries its own kind of te...

This is a Greatest Hits episode - a re-release of the second part of my conversation with Lou Cove, from Season 2 Episode 21 (the interview spanned episdoes 20 & 21).  Lou Cove is the director of CANVAS, an organization that is very important to Art/Lab, in terms of funding, guidance, netwworking iwth other Jewish creative organizations, and inspiration.   Art/ Lab is part of the CANVAS network.  ...

Welcome to The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture (previously The Genesis). Mark Rubin is a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, bassist, tuba player, bandleader, producer, and educator whose work sits at the   crossroads of American roots music and Jewish culture.   Mark has spent more than three decades moving across musical boundaries: bluegrass, country, western...

Here's one of my favorite stories from the Talmud. I hope you find some inspiration in it.  Please note that starting next week the podcast will have a new name: The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture .  If you are a subscriber you don't need to change a thing. You will notice some changes in the artwork for the podcast (see below), but everything else will remain the sam...

We are re-releasing this episode recorded back in February because our guest is coming to Portland for a residency starting May 18th.  But even if you're not here in the City of Roses the conversation is worth re-visiting. It's one of my favorites and Cara offers a lot to think about in her approach.  ------------------ Original Introduction:  In this episode I sit down with artist Cara Levine and...

Rabbi Josh hosts Amitai Man and Talia Erdal of Jerusalem's Zamru Ensemble, a Fuchsberg Center project, ahead of Zamru's June 8–10 Portland residency presented with ArtLab. They describe Zamru as a network that began as a fellowship for prayer leaders and musicians and grew into weekly prayer circles and a touring ensemble creating participatory musical-prayer spaces rather than performances. Amita...

Welcome to The Genesis . I'm Rabbi Josh. My guest this week is  Yankl Falk . We've been on a bit of a tear interviewing musicians—Michelle Alany, Yair Dalal, and now Yankl Falk, who is a fabulous klezmer musician and a wonderful person. If you live in Portland, Oregon, you may have heard Yankl playing around the city with his fabulous band. We talk not just about klezmer, but about growing up Jewi...

Welcome to The Genesis . If you heard my episode with Eric Stern, then you already know that today's guest will be performing at the Portland Jewish Music Festival on Saturday, May 16. If you have not heard that episode, go back and listen to it—you will hear about all the remarkable things happening at this year's festival. I was especially grateful to have the chance to speak with today's guest,...

My guest this week is Eric Stern. If you're a long time listener to the podcast, you may remember the episode that I did with Eric way back when, but that time it was really just a goal to get to know Eric as a musician and as a creative person, which he is. But this time I have Eric on because he is the Director of Programming and Cultural Arts Ambassador at the East Side Jewish Commons, which is...

 Welcome to the genesis. In this episode, I talk with violinist, vocalist, and composer Michelle Elani, who was part of the first art lab cohort way back when. She is a musician who weaves together different musical and cultural universes into a totally unique and beautiful fabric. Michelle has lit up a great many venues with her music. She's toured internationally with both her own music. And is...

Rabbi Josh offers a perspective on the artistic significance of the Exodus.

In this episode, I speak with Portland fused-glass artist Eddy Shuldman, co-founder of  ORA: Northwest Jewish Artists , about the long path by which art, teaching, and Jewish life became inseparable for her. Eddy describes how she first turned to art not out of artistic ambition, but as a discipline of humility while working with at-risk youth: she wanted to keep learning hard things, failing publ...

In this episode, I speak with painter Dana Nehdaran about art, memory, and the complexity of Jewish-Iranian identity. Dana resists being reduced to a label and prefers to think of himself simply as a painter, but our conversation shows how deeply history and identity can still inform an artist's work without confining it. We discuss his upbringing in Iran in a traditional but not especially religi...

We're starting something new here at the podcast. Periodically, we're going to Jewish invite artists to share their work directly with you. So today we bring you Daniela Naomi Molnar reading three of her poems. Daniela is an Art/Lab alum. I interviewed her for this podcast, so you might be familiar with her work. I interviewed her back in season number one and last season she and I hosted a conver...

In this conversation with playwright Andrea Stolowitz, I found myself moving back and forth with her between cities, art forms, and identities. We begin with the contrast between New York and Portland—how New York's sheer density of artistic life (and vastly stronger funding) can make theater feel culturally central, while Portland as a City has to keep stretching to match the artistic talent here...

My guest this week is Steve Marcus, a New York–based artist who's on our radar because he's currently on exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. His work is visually striking—sometimes funny, always interesting—and it's a genuinely profound engagement with Jewish ideas and identity through the language of pop culture. A lot of his aesthetic is rooted in the comic-bo...

In this episode, I speak with filmmaker and journalist Toby Perl Freilich about why some subjects demand the documentary form. Freilich contrasts writing's breadth with film's "shallow medium that packs a punch," arguing that moving images—especially archival footage—can create an unusually immediate kind of understanding. Our discussion centers on  Freilich's feature documentary Maintenance Artis...

In this second part of my conversation with Dana Lynn Lewis, she reflects on how art can be  "political" even when it isn't issuing explicit slogans: in a culture that underfunds artists and treats art as decor, simply insisting that creative work matters is political.  We get into the difference between message-forward political art and art that opens a capacious vessel—inviting people to express...

My guest this week is Dana Lynn Lewis, a Portland artist whose work is fabulous but does not stay politely inside the gallery by any means. Dana is the founder of Gather:Make:Shelter, a long running collaborative project that brings professional artists together with people experiencing houselessness and poverty making work side by side, sharing meals. Paying participants for their time and then b...

In this episode I sit down with artist Cara Levine and we discuss how grief informs her work in tangible ways. Cara's work is on exhibit right now at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. She lives in California now, but was a Portlander for a time. Her multi-media work is in a sweet spot between engaged in real world problems and ethereal other-worldliness. Cara is also inf...

This episode takes a different tack on one of this podcast's central themes; Jewish culture—how it's made, displayed, argued over, and lived. In this episode, I sit down with Rebekah Sobel, the Director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE), for a conversation that treats museums not as neutral storehouses, but as active cultural engines: places where communities...

In this episode I sit down with writer, poet, and Alexander Technique teacher Eve Bernfeld to talk about what it means to sustain a creative life in the middle of parenting, teaching, and everyday obligations. We talk about discipline and devotion — daily writing practices, working through creative resistance, and what happens when you take yourself seriously as an artist even when time, energy, a...